The Lost and the Found

https://unidentified-awareness.fandom.com/wiki/Joyce_Meyer

Joyce Marilyn Meyer Sommers (July 13, 1927 - December 18, 1996) was a woman who died by suicide in 1996 in Annandale, Virginia. Upon the discovery, she had written a note requesting cremation, no autopsy and signed it as "Jane Doe." While unidentified, she was nicknamed "Christmas Tree Lady".

She was identified by Othram Inc in July 2022.

Case
Joyce Meyer was born on July 13, 1927, the eldest of 3 girls and 2 boys and was raised on a farm outside of Davenport, Iowa. She attended Iowa State University and later moved to Los Angeles where she lived with an aunt while working for Seventeen magazine. Meyer then left Seventeen in the 1950s to teach second grade at a Catholic school in the city. Around that time Meyer began seeing a psychiatrist whose treatments alienated Meyer from her family. Sometime in the 1960s, she had a confrontation with her mother in which Meyer accused her of being a bad parent.

Meyer eventually moved to Seattle and married James E. Sommers, but she didn't notify her family. The couple had no children and divorced in 1977. Meyer then moved to a trailer park in Tucson, Arizona. In the 1980s, Meyer's siblings visited her; she asked them to help build her a home which they couldn't do. Meyer was never seen or heard from again after that.

In the early 1990s, Meyer's siblings attempted to find her. Meyer's brother, Larry Meyer, went back to the trailer park where he found her trailer abandoned. He found four copies of a book in her fridge that she self-published called The Target Child. The book was about Meyer's supposedly abusive childhood, but her sister, Clough, doesn't believe their parents were abusive or that all of them suffered growing up.

During the early 1990's, a private investigator hired by Larry Meyer and Clough's ex-husband managed to find evidence that Meyer moved to the East Coast, but further efforts proved useless. Public records show that Meyer might have lived in Northern Virginia, possibly Alexandria, in 1996. The records show an address for her in downtown Washington D.C, a townhouse on Massachusetts Avenue that has since been integrated into another building.

https://abc13.com/abc13-unsolved-cold-case-princess-blue-identified-julie-gwenn-davis/6253787/

13 UNSOLVED: 'Princess Blue' found dead on gravel road in Manvel 30 years ago finally identified
By Courtney Fischer via KTRK logo
Monday, June 22, 2020

MANVEL, Texas (KTRK) -- The missing woman known only as "Princess Blue" for 30 years now has a name.

She is Julie Gwenn Davis, according to Manvel police.

On September 10, 1990, her bones were found on the side of County Road 101, east of what's now Highway 288, in Manvel. There wasn't much evidence, except some silver rings and a pearl bracelet. There was no purse or identification.

The autopsy didn't reveal much. The medical examiner couldn't say for sure how the woman died. There were no drugs in her system. She had a couple of fractured ribs. At the time, it was believed she was likely between 15 and 19 years old. No one in the area came forward looking for a missing woman. The case went cold.

Fast-forward 16 years when a curious detective reopened the box of jewelry collected from the scene and noticed one of the rings was a high school class ring. The year 1975 was carved into the band along with the school name: Robert E. Lee, the high school located in west Houston. Police released pictures of the ring with the bright blue stone to the media, hoping to generate new leads.

The mystery woman became known as Princess Blue.

In November, ABC13 got exclusive access to her case. Detectives showed us never before seen photos of what little evidence they had and her jewelry.

Meanwhile, about 130 miles east of Manvel in Orange, Texas, Danny Davis had just given his DNA to a Texas Ranger, in hopes of finding his sister, Julie Davis, who went missing 33 years ago. The Texas Ranger was investigating the possibility Julie might have been a missing woman found dead in another part of the state.

But when Danny's DNA went into the state database, it matched Princess Blue's DNA. Investigators say with 99.9% certainty, Princess Blue is Julie Davis.

"I'm still trying to process that they found her. That it took so long," Danny told ABC13 over the phone from his home in Orange. "I wouldn't have believed it's her if that detective didn't tell me the DNA matched."

He said he had never heard of the Princess Blue case.

We asked if Julie could have had any connection to Houston or to Robert E. Lee High School.

"I just found out last night from my sister, Shelly, that Shelly met Julie's husband at one point, years back, and she said he was from Houston," Danny said.

Danny believes Julie got married at 18, shortly after she left home and headed for New Orleans. Danny was 17 years old at the time.

"That's the last thing I remember of her, her giving me a hug, telling me she loved me, and she broke down in tears and walked away, and that's the last time I saw her," Danny said.

Detectives still don't know what Julie's connection to the class ring could have been, the ring that made her case so mysterious. Now, the real investigation begins.

Police are looking to Danny and Julie's four other siblings for help.

"I miss her," Danny said. "I'd give anything to see her again. She was always smiling, always happy."

Julie's parents both passed away never knowing what happened to their daughter. But Manvel police have met with Julie's brothers and sisters. Danny says he's in the process of trying to get Julie's remains back to their home in Orange to give Julie the burial she deserves.

"I want (people) to know she had a face. She has a name and now, I'm fixing to give it back to her. And I get to say goodbye to her," Danny said.

Now that Princess Blue has been identified, detectives have reignited the investigation. Because the medical examiner was never able to figure out her cause of death, police still don't know for certain if Julie was murdered.

"To be honest with you, I don't think she died naturally. No one is going to walk down a dead end road, jump over a guardrail and drop dead," Danny said. "Regardless of what it takes, I want to work to find out who took my sister's life, if that happens to be the case. I want them to pay for their crime."

Julie's family is raising money to bury her. If you'd like to donate, visit their gofundme page.

Princess Blue has been identified as 20-year-old Julie Gwenn Davis missing from New Orleans, Louisiana since 1987.

Annandale isn't very far from the airport.

This fanny pack is interesting. It's in terrible condition. The elastic looks stretched out in one section. The zipper looks like it has a safety pin attached to it. I guess that's tape on the section at the left. Why would she keep this? It must have had special significance.

Jewelry: Two clip-on earrings, a small gold women's Guess watch with a mesh band, a 14-karat gold ring with four jade stones, and a metal bead chain with a medic alert "NO CODE, DNR, No Penicillin."

It's interesting that her ears were not pierced.


Jewelry: Two clip-on earrings, a small gold women's Guess watch with a mesh band, a 14-karat gold ring with four jade stones, and a metal bead chain with a medic alert "NO CODE, DNR, No Penicillin."

You Might Be A Redneck If...
Jeff Foxworthy

June 15, 1993

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arch...wn-dead/25553f3d-208b-43e5-84a1-176b304996aa/

Unsettling Tales of the Unknown Dead

By Tom Jackman
December 5, 2000

Just inside Pleasant Valley Memorial Park, a small cemetery in Annandale, a freshly coiffed auburn-haired woman in her late fifties or early sixties spread a clear plastic sheet on the ground. Next to the sheet, she placed an eight-inch Christmas tree, adorned with gold balls and red ribbons. She wore bifocals with a translucent frame, a blue all-weather Eddie Bauer hooded jacket over a blue sweater and blue pants, and she carried a green knapsack.

In the darkness of a mid-December morning, she sat down and finished off a flask of brandy, perhaps chasing it with bottles of peach and mango juices. She turned on a portable tape player, placed headphones over her ears and listened to a recording of comedians Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner doing their "2,000-Year-Old Man" routine. Then she reached into her knapsack and pulled out a plastic bag and a roll of masking tape, placed the bag over her head and tied it off with the tape. She put the roll of tape back in the knapsack, then lay down and suffocated.

It was Dec. 18, 1996, when "Jane Doe" committed suicide, apparently determined to remain anonymous. And nearly four years later, she has.

It happens occasionally in every police department. A body is discovered, and no one seems to know who it is. Sometimes it's a homicide; but more often it's a suicide or death by accident or exposure. Normally, the mystery is solved within hours, a few days at the most.

But even in these days of automated fingerprints, DNA testing and computerized police information networks, Virginia authorities still must unravel about four similar mysteries every year. For some counties, publishing an enhanced photo of the person has led to a quick identification. That is being done for the first time today for Fairfax's Jane Doe, with computer enhancement done by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Statewide, of the 40 unidentified people found since 1990, 38 remain anonymous, said Cynthia Morrison, a medico-legal death investigator for the state medical examiner in Richmond. Even though the state undertakes a long series of scientific steps to try to place a name with a person, many still evade identification.

"With these unidentified people, they're like my children," Morrison said. "I want them to go home. I feel so horrible for the families. Even if they weren't the cream of society, somebody loved them. It's my own personal crusade."

Many of the detectives working on the mysteries feel the same way. The case of Fairfax's Jane Doe shows why.

When cemetery workers found her shortly after 9 a.m., they called police. Detectives Richard Perez and Mike Headley arrived 40 minutes later, and her body was still warm. As the investigators checked her pockets for identification, they found only two envelopes, one addressed to the cemetery and one to the coroner. Both contained two crisp $50 bills and the same typed note:

"Deceased by own hand. . . . Prefer no autopsy. Please order cremation, with funds provided. Thank you, Jane Doe."

When they couldn't identify the woman through fingerprints or locate any family from missing persons reports, police distributed a drawing of the woman through the news media. Still nothing.

Not everyone's fingerprints are on file. Not every missing person is reported to police. "Just because we have the ability to track people doesn't mean we're going to catch everybody," Morrison said. Some of the unidentified may have been mentally ill or homeless, or they may have been substance abusers. "And these are the people that are slipping through the cracks," Morrison said.

The number of unidentified cases has stayed roughly the same over the years--no increases, but no noticeable decreases even with the technological advances.

"What makes it so frustrating," Perez said of Jane Doe, "is this isn't a case where we're dealing with skeletal remains. This is a lady that somebody should recognize."

After a number of days have passed without an identification, police and medical examiners have a standard procedure to try to develop an identity. A complete set of photographs and X-rays, from head to toe, is taken, and the clothes are fully documented. Finger and palm prints are taken, as is a DNA sample.

A forensic odontologist, a specialist in dental science, performs a dental exam and devises a numeric code that is entered into the National Crime Information Computer, as are the codes for the fingerprints. A radiologist reviews the X-rays for distinctive marks or breaks. A high-resolution photo of the prints is sent to the FBI for closer examination. And if the person appears to be from another country, the Immigration and Naturalization Service is also consulted.

Sometimes, all those steps produce nothing. A man who apparently was strangled and discovered in a trunk in Loudoun County in May 1996 remains unidentified. And a woman apparently shot to death in Falls Church in May 1990 also is unidentified.

Technology has provided some help--twice by computer software at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that was used to retouch photos, providing a far less traumatized view of the person.

In Prince William County in 1996, a 19-year-old woman who had been unidentified for two weeks was named the same day her enhanced photo was broadcast on television. And in Alexandria several years earlier, a man who had died of a heart attack on a city street was identified only after his photo was retouched and released.

Fairfax has two unidentified victims from the 1990s. Detectives call the first one "the Bone Lady," because only her skeleton was found in a Centreville field in 1993. When an anthropologist from the Smithsonian Institution examined her, he found knife wounds on the bones, probably dating to the late 1980s. Last year, a Fairfax officer crafted a clay recreation of her face, complete with eyes, hair, lips and her distinctive front teeth, one of which was crooked and decayed.

The other Fairfax case is Jane Doe. Every year during the holiday season, the case gnaws at Perez, because the woman's body was found a week before Christmas. He figured that as healthy and well dressed as she was, and with as many clues as she left, he would have identified her long ago. But he resigned from the Fairfax department Friday to take a job in North Carolina, with Jane Doe still frustrating him.

"If she's a drifter, she's the best-kept drifter I've ever seen," Perez said. She wore a gold Guess watch, a 14-karat gold ring with four jade stones, and clothes that Perez thinks might have come from an upscale store such as Saks Fifth Avenue. The site she chose for her demise, Pleasant Valley, probably wouldn't be known to a drifter.

The woman had an eight-inch scar on her stomach, possibly from a Caesarean section. She lay down to die near the section of the cemetery where infants are buried, but not near any particular grave, and most of the stones nearby were fairly recent.

In addition to drinking brandy (she had a 0.14 blood-alcohol level) and swallowing Valium, she had two empty juice bottles and a new roll of masking tape in her knapsack. But, unlike many suicides Perez sees, she had no receipts in her pockets to enable police to trace her movements. "Most people don't think about that when they commit suicide," Perez said.

"This lady appears to have taken a thoughtful effort to leave us no clue as to who she is, and she's got it all plotted out," Perez added, noting the typed suicide notes, the money for cremation, even the plastic sheet on the ground. "I don't think I've had another case that's beaten me up like this one."

Anyone with information about the women may call Fairfax police at 703-691-2131.